You won't need the force to make these awesome Star Wars painted rocks!

Here’s a fun Star Wars craft to do with the kids for May the Fourth Be With You (Star Wars Day) or any day! We absolutely love rock painting over here, and we needed some Star Wars inspired rocks to add to our collection. These would be fun to make and hide if your city does a painted rock program.

I have two tips for making the details on these rocks look great:

• Tiny paintbrushes! It’s worth getting some good ones at the craft store.
• Fine line Sharpies! Do your outlining and details with a marker wherever possible.

We use acrylic paint for our rock painting, and I would recommend spraying them with a coat of polyurethane to make them more durable. Even so, ours still get chipped a little, but not as bad as without the spray. I just buy those $1 little bottles of acrylic paint at Walmart or Hobby Lobby.

I also purchase our rocks. We just don’t have nice smooth rocks like this in Texas, but Home Depot has bags of Caribbean beach pebbles that work quite nicely for painting.

My other big tip is to draw the designs with pencil first before painting.

I’m working with my kids on using the tip of the brush, rather than pressing down with it. Brushes are not designed to be scrubbed across the rock like a toothbrush! But I digress…

BB-8 is similar to the painted Easter egg version that I made last year. I drew the head with pencil before painted the whole rock white. I could still see the lines faintly under the paint, and I re-drew them before adding the details.

Here’s Yoda and and Luke. Painting humans is hard, so it’s best to just keep it simple!

The lightsaber might be my favorite! Well, actually BB-8 is probably my favorite. But the lightsaber is very easy to paint.

The Millennium Falcon was much easier to paint than it looks. I painted the outline in black and left the ship unpainted. Then the details are all drawn with a fine tip Sharpie.

The outlining on the rebel alliance symbol is also drawn with Sharpie.

Last but not least is Chewbacca! For this one, I painted the entire rock dark brown. The fur was surprisingly easy to paint with a lighter color of brown.

The R2-D2 and C3P0 I actually painted last year for a big collection of painted rocks.

To make the details on C3P0, I mixed the gold paint with a little black to make a darker shade of gold.

Have fun with rock painting!

Need more ideas? Here are 25+ Awesome Ideas for Painting Rocks. My other favorite project is LEGO® painted rocks.